


marginalia

by samarqand



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Elf Culture & Customs, M/M, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:06:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27173551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: Exhaustion gets the better of Aragorn one evening in Fangorn. Fever dreams ensue.*From fanfic purgatory to the Good Intentions WIP Fest! When you try your best and definitely do not succeed.
Relationships: Aragorn | Estel/Legolas Greenleaf
Comments: 8
Kudos: 46
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	marginalia

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the one fic I've been sitting on for months, writing and retooling, and finally tossing aside in dismay.
> 
> I intended to explore Aragorn as a _human_ human: Dúnadan though he is, still a fallible mortal Man with weaknesses, who wears out, who isn't always sure of himself -- who has desires, even if he cannot articulate who, how, why. 
> 
> And if Aragorn wants to model himself after Beren, I also wanted to give him that peek into the past: let him in on the slow disintegration of the Elves' power through the Ages -- even if in the context of a feverish dreamscape.
> 
> It did not succeed because I was trying way too many things at once, while still shaky on character voices. Some bits of this fic graduated to better fics; some of the ideas are just disposable. But hey, at least you get a brief bit of smut out of this unfinished thing.

No, Aragorn thinks upon opening his eyes. No. Not now. Not in the tar black darkness and its silence that bares plain his indignity. He considers his courses of action: he could clear his throat to awaken Gimli where he sleeps fitfully and mutter to him, _If I do not return by daybreak, I have lost my way_. Gimli would nod and start charting the progress of dawn in the back of his sagacious mind even as he turned over to collect a precious few more minutes of rest.

Or he could remain frozen in place and search the dark-laden tree boughs above his head, seeking where Legolas perches on his watch; he could torture himself surmising what the Elf might have heard as clearly as starlight on the plains. What it says about Aragorn.

No. He decides to wipe the sweat from his brow and clamber to his feet alone, feeling out where the moss thickens -- feel his way to water, wash away embarrassment. He keeps an eye on the smoldering embers of their fire, his beacon back to safety, but urges himself far enough away that his shame cannot be marked. It is not the most responsible operation, to wander off in Fangorn’s alien elements under cover of night; he shall consider this, he thinks ruefully to himself, the punctuation concluding a litany of his own shortcomings this evening. One night of weakness for a bedraggled Ranger.

He clenches his jaw, leaning on the mistrustful trees for the only support he will abide. There is nothing left to deny, hide under a mien worthy of Gondorian kings -- or stomp down until he can pretend he cannot say whether it's buried in him at all.

This is a mess of his own making and he’ll bear it alone.

+

It happens when the lush Rohan plains abruptly halt at the thick line of trees. A few paces into Fangorn on the trail of two intrepid hobbits, Aragorn begins to count each breath to keep himself steady. Gimli is complaining about the stifling forest and Aragorn would concur but for the newfound invisibility the fortress of dark growth provides; after days of flying past little but rocky outcroppings, weeds, dull shrubbery, it relieves him to be hidden.

Aragorn stumbles over a tree root and shakes himself. His eyes drop shut for a long moment before he reminds himself this would be an absurd time to let down his guard.

Instead, he turns his focus to Legolas gliding through the ferns and intrusive branches, his winsome face transfixed and eagerly drinking in the labyrinth of leaf and thorn. He is more than at home; he has uncovered a home he did not know still existed, save in song.

In all his young years spent alongside the Elves of Imladris, Aragorn has never seen an Elf more swept away with -- grounded by -- the wilds. It moves Aragorn, and he asks himself why he cannot follow suit and give himself over to this moment, why malaise steadily sinks its claws into him and overthrows him.

“A new language,” Legolas whispers to himself in his Silvan-colored Sindarin. “An ancient language.”

Aragorn wants to ask, but instead tears his gaze away to press his knuckles into his eyes. Floating firefly lights. Sensation of sinking.

And Legolas curves through the trees, flickering out of sight only to reemerge onto their rude path without a sound. Firefly light.

Gimli stays firmly within his narrow march, elbows tucked and expression furtive as he turns hither and thither to assess obscure threats.

Aragorn strides purposefully with his bearing dignified, taking in the wayward whirl of trees until he suddenly falls to his knees and retches.

Gimli does not worry, only exhales through his teeth. “Ah, now now,” he sighs, sympathetic. The Dwarf has had plenty of dealings with Men in his time and it seems has gained insight into their manifold weaknesses. He gives Aragorn a couple calm pats on his back while he heaves dry and aching, grabbing at the damp earth until he uproots grasses and nameless little ferns.

He takes a few centering breaths to compose himself, the soil’s fragrance in his nose when he passes a hand over his face. He tells himself he is well, sitting back on his haunches. He glimpses Legolas wide-eyed and puzzled, caught in a half-step toward him.

“I am alright,” Aragorn croaks, his own voice muffled in his ears. The trees close in on him, unknowable forces that could crush them all where they wait. He shakes his head slowly to banish his disorientation; it does nothing.

Legolas’ hand, impossibly smooth and soothing, alights on Aragorn’s cheek. A benediction. His eyelids drop shut to the sensation. “Your skin burns,” he observes. To Gimli, hushed: “Not poison?”

“Fevers will plague Men as they so please,” Gimli dismisses out of hand, “even one as mighty as our Aragorn here. The why’s of a fever are elusive, but I judge the culprit here...” Gimli pauses, and then nods sagely: “ –- Exhaustion.”

“What will happen?” Legolas asks steadily.

“Lad, who neglected to teach you about Men? Nothing will happen,” Gimli grouses. “He will be hale after a decent night’s rest. Indeed, the first decent night’s rest we have had in a time.” A pause. “And if he is not back on his feet after a decent night’s rest, well -- we will reassess my assessment.”

“Nothing will happen,” Aragorn echoes Gimli, bidden to speak by his own silence yet finding nothing in him to offer. He wants to sleep. He wants to press his face against the black soil and roots and sink into the ominous forest floor like it’s a lumpy cot in Bree. Let all Fangorn’s unnamed horrors and curiosities curl up next to him in growling slumber.

Anything to curtail the queasy, unassailable folding of the world about him.

Legolas summarily identifies a near-cavernous encirclement of tree boles. “We shall find refuge in this peaceful corner here.” The tree boughs stretch out above their heads, utterly still.

And not a sound but for the remote creaks and sighs somewhere among the leaves that the Elf turns his head from time to time to acknowledge.

“No,” Aragorn returns, not so much a protestation as an empty word; no strength in him to muster conviction, he wavers when he rises to his feet. Legolas steadies him with a hand to his back.

Gimli thumbs at his axe. “Unpleasant as our lot is to settle down in an unwholesome place such as this, I agree it is time to sit and recover. For all of us, Master Aragorn.”

Legolas eases Aragorn into a craggy cradle of root and soft earth. “What can I do?” he asks, his voice very near within the quiet.

Aragorn fumbles around on his person; he produces a sachet of little clove buds to crush and consume, a poor substitute for willow bark’s antipyretic properties, but they will do. He hands over the sachet and directs the Elf in briefest words to grind and mix them into water.

Legolas stares keenly into the expanse of forest while preparing the medicine, completely taken with the primeval press of trees and their secret lives. Close at hand, Gimli lights a cautious little fire, casting spurious glances at those trees as though they would suddenly rear up and stamp out the flame with their gnarled roots.

A freeze seizes Aragorn and he shivers in the hefty air. Legolas watches as he grits his way through drinking the bitter concoction, teeth chattering away.

Absurd, Aragorn thinks as he folds his arms over his eyes. The three of them, the Hunters, closer to rescuing those hobbits than they have been in days, and ailment topples him the moment he slows his pace. What ilk of leader can he claim to be? “Is this the Man you would call heir?” Aragorn asks himself aloud.

Or is this convenient exhaustion only some sublimated plan for delaying the inevitable? Just one more night living as a fallible Ranger, groan his limbs. One more night hidden away from the pandemonium of this Age, swims his mind.

Warm weight floats onto him, and Aragorn cracks open his eyes to find Legolas covering him with his heather-grey cloak. He has been regarding Aragorn with a mournful look, which he expertly erases and replaces with a serene smile when their eyes meet. He tucks his cloak in around Aragorn. “Be at ease, Aragorn,” he murmurs.

Legolas’ cloak smells like lavender and petrichor. It is absurd. It is arresting. Aragorn does not fight it, only presses his face into the cloak and obeys.

+

Say you are Beren.

Say Menegroth sinks into the mud. The pillars crumble; the shining pieces of its glory, now mere memory, leave in Dwarves’ hands, save Nauglamír. Surely this matters. Surely it makes up for the loss Melian warned you of while she keened wth grief.

It's dismantled as though it were a matter of course.(?) The empire begins its creaking descent. The captured amber light that once warmed the kingdom goes dim, powerless against the collapse of all that is known.

Menegroth sinks into the mud and you, for all your heroics, are too late to save it. Doriath's girdle dissolves with Melian's grief. You are too late to keep its Elves from the terror. Is nowhere safe?

You are too late to save him: your love’s father, the king.

You cannot have Lúthien witnessing this destruction, but you must see it for yourself. You owe the king your witness, you think, but there is so much of the collapse’s detritus and grit waylaying you that it is difficult to make out what you are seeing. There are many slender hands outstretched and cold, asking for help you are too late to give; there are shivering weapons abandoned where they fell.

Blood squeaks underfoot as you walk with a wretched reverence to Elu Thingol’s chambers. Someone has placed his tall, bruised body on the bed. Someone has lovingly washed his fair face clean while the rest of his body remains forsaken, stricken with violence.

“My king,” you try, for his eyes are open; perhaps he has fled from the pain through reverie. Perhaps this is how he has died.

But Elu Thingol asks, his voice hollow as bird bones: “Where is Lúthien?”

“She is far away.”

“Where is Lúthien?”

“She will be safe far away.”

“No,” Thingol rasps. He sees far away. He watches her, he watches something where it is still far away. But his tortured form seizes as if he wants nothing more than to drag himself away from it. “They are coming. It is coming.”

“I will see her protected,” you vow. You do not know what you are up against.

The king thinly smiles into the nothingness. “You have doomed her.”

His breathing turns to air. You back away.

Out in the tarnished and heaving hallways, you finally notice the Elves hiding among the numberless dead; they crouch beneath tables and slashed tapestries; they cower in the corners when they find nowhere else to hide, looking like prey. Diminished.

And the dead on the floor watch you openly, placid disregard for you etched onto their grey faces.

Oropher is standing with his back to you, his statuesque form curved over his little son, whom he clutches tightly. He is frozen with fear, expecting death to come swift and harsh. Presently. Oropher is a shadow of himself, a new hateful, frightful knowing burgeoning within him; he is breathing shallowly, as though to keep his life hidden.

He covers his son to shield him from all of this. But he cannot.

Oropher is standing in a puddle of pale spring leaves and flowers that he had wedded to his and his boy’s hair. They have been torn away and have fallen to his feet in the strife.

“I am here,” you say.

To fail.

To portend calamity.

To see what the end of the world looks like.

“Nothing will happen.” The words drop from your mouth and fumble into futility. You taste blood; it thickens the air into a fog. You tell yourself no Elf, not Lúthien the fairest of all, not Oropher, not any of these Elves shall endure this again as long as you draw breath.

Thranduil looks over his father’s shoulder at you with wide eyes, wet with tears. Oropher stills suddenly; he draws his hand over Thranduil’s mouth to keep the death from entering him.

“Perhaps I die like you,” Oropher says, "to make room for you."

He turns to look at you.

+

Aragorn opens his eyes -- he tries opening his eyes. Pain, stinging would assail him into submission if not for his rapidly failing mettle. He has broken into a sweat despite the cold's grip.

Gimli and Legolas are standing at his feet, watching him.

“Men,” Gimli explains. Legolas nods.

“What,” Aragorn bites out. Vertigo picks him up in a great swooping gale. He half-turns onto his side but finds it impossible to sit up.

“Your dreams trouble you,” Legolas offers vaguely, with no further explanation; Aragorn doesn’t need any.

A silence of consideration, then of absence: Legolas has vanished into the murk. “Do not go rambling too far off, my friend! I cannot fend off the strangeness here alone,” Gimli grouses.

Dozing unease claims Aragorn in the quiet until Legolas returns, hopping into view with a bouquet of cheerful, newly bloomed little daisies in hand and an armful of dandelions.

“Oho,” Gimli lights up. “Good.” He grabs at the dandelions and sets about to make a soup with enviable fervor. “'Dandelions' in Elf tongue -- ,” Gimli starts slowly.

Soundless and lithe, Legolas kneels by Aragorn with the bouquet. He responds to Gimli in clear, slow Sindarin, affecting a standardized accent in lieu of his usual Silvan one. He sends a smile to the Dwarf, brightening the dead-dark.

Legolas turns back to Aragorn, a smile for him, as well: “I come bearing a gift for you, O ailing healer,” he teases, not bothering to hide his satisfaction; Aragorn quirks a smile in spite of himself. “I have found you featherfoil.”

Plucking the frond-like leaves from the stems, Legolas strews the yellow blossoms across his lap. “Featherfoil leaves I know both Man and Elf alike take for comfort,” he offers, pressing three lush leaves into Aragorn’s hand. “Save, we Silvan folk would expect to consume them alongside much song and wine.”

“Thank you, Legolas,” Aragorn says, chewing through the tannic taste. It settles on his tongue harsh, lambasting him for his frailty. His limbs are anchors. He could sink. “No,” he clarifies after a moment of only rest, “Men do not take featherfoil as a diversion.”

Legolas hums and strokes lightly at Aragorn’s damp forehead where his brows knit in ardor. “Think of spring,” he says in Sindarin, a language of comfort to Aragorn. Legolas recognizes this instinctively; perhaps the Elf traces it in the topography of Aragorn’s features, where the stress lies and the way it vanishes when he hears it and speaks it in kind. It is a language of memory and future. A language beloved, a language wreathed in memories of love and hope of love. Even when spoken in a Silvan accent.

No, Aragorn foolishly surmises: perhaps, tonight, precisely because of the accent. All it takes to disarm him.

Legolas’ voice curtains him in something akin to a melody. “Spring and its gentle green growing beneath your heels; the regal rowan trees crowned in shining white blooms. For you see, I believe the trees about us, despite all the darkness they inhabit, are thinking of these things, too.”

His hand goes to Aragorn’s hair, touching with some reservation until Aragorn turns his head toward the grounding caress, vertigo be damned.

“Whatever else these great, ancient ones may be ruminating upon this evening,” Legolas adds with a wistful lilt, “we shall have all night to imagine.”

It is vastly preferable to wonder what the trees above could be discussing than to dwell upon the smell of blood looming in dreams like a harbinger. The king’s eyes open for good. Bodies broken and abandoned. The very heart of a folk clinging to elegant, beautiful wreckage as though it will see them through to the next Age.

The yawning maw of war, and how everything will be swallowed up into it.

Aragorn thinks: he does not want to find a lesson in this. He does not want to simply abide the bitter tale scrawled across his destiny in a heavy, funereal black -- to simply survive it. He does not want to understand what is coming to them just beyond this forest.

He wants to relearn Sindarin with Legolas and that accent, converse breezily about Elves and their propensity for taking featherfoil with their wine and teaching all manner of creatures their Elvish languages; he wants to spar in Sindarin with Gimli until it comes naturally; he wants to keep Legolas speaking his Woodland Sindarin to him, every phrase a beatitude. Warm daylight and cool waters.

“Does,” Aragorn manages, with a wry look just beyond the unplaceable pain, wanting to hear more from Legolas, “it fascinate you?”

Legolas’ head lists to one side.

“This Man’s weakness,” Aragorn clarifies, mustering a smile.

Legolas' slender fingers thread deeply into Aragorn’s hair and stroke, touch so kind and communicative against his thrumming head that Aragorn is overcome by grace. “Not at all,” Legolas whispers.

“Oh,” Aragorn only replies, distracted. His eyes drop shut.

“I am fascinated better by your tales of far-flung Rhûn, and what stars you saw there.” Legolas waits a couple heartbeats before speaking again, drinking in what the claustrophobic night reveals by firelight. “What mighty and small beings.”

“Will tell you what more I can when I am able,” Aragorn murmurs, squinting with protesting eyes to catch the light off Legolas’ shining hair. He makes a supernaturally blurred and cross-legged constellation beside Aragorn.

“In times of peace, I heard fables of elusive Avari kin unknown to me, Elves who thrive wild and free in their unlit lands deep in Rhûn. They roam distant from the sun-kissed vineyards of Dorwinian and rule unmapped forests where none may meet them, save if they wish it.”

Aragorn listens.

“I wonder, is it a darkness like Fangorn where they persist? Or could it be that my own dreaming can scarcely picture the shades of the world they inhabit? What shapes do they construct in their tongues? Or are their tongues moribund and all but lost to us ere we even knew them?” Legolas lifts his head, as though to seek guidance from the starlight beyond the forest’s thick canopy. But nothing can find them in here. “How they commune with the trees, and what in reply they hear; how they love; what they love.”

Aragorn considers dragging his traitorous body just a pace closer to rest his head in Legolas’ lap, but that would be an absolutely absurd decision. He gathers Legolas’ cloak closer against himself instead. Cold and warm.

They will not find another chance to talk like this, sequestered in such a generously overbearing forest; apprehension of disappointing both himself and Legolas commands him to speak: “Together we may yet solve these riddles,” he offers, faintly as he feels. “One day. We could travel as far East as it takes to learn.”

Legolas casts him a mildly appreciative look. Aragorn distantly registers that Legolas does not believe him; they will likely never make such a journey together -- and that he alone holds onto the hope when Legolas has already let go is a barb that wounds him.

Their time together is as good as gone, for how swiftly the world spins now.

“I sought to know,” Aragorn tries, mind adrift with thoughts of language and Legolas and the words to say, “the minds of the Men of Rhûn in my travels there. It was a land of many tongues I could not divine. Many. Perhaps in the midst were those Avari dialects, unbeknownst to me." He blinks slowly. "As for me -- I could piece together fragments of Haradaic, common in Rhûn.” He draws in a breath, looking up at Legolas. “It is a beautiful speech.”

Night calls, calming, and he allows himself to close his eyes to it.

He relishes the sensation of Legolas’ gentle nails against his scalp, and Legolas notices. “My father would do this for me in my youth,” the Elf says, those slender fingers twining through Aragorn’s hair, rhythmic, “whenever I was ill at ease.”

“’S good,” Aragorn mumbles, before dropping away into sleep.

“’S good,” Legolas agrees, a smile in his voice.

+

Say Menegroth sinks into the mud and you, for all your heroics, are too late to save it. You are too late to keep Doriath and its Elves from the terror. You are too late to save him: your love’s father, the king.

He turns to you like he has been waiting, and you almost drop your blade when you see the hideous gash dragging down his face. Red and hateful. The ferocious dead.

“My king,” you try for wont of other words, because words have failed you just as your sword has. You take a step toward him, wondering what your healer’s hands can do when the hurt is so profound, but you must try –-

“No,” Thranduil says. His teeth flash white and vicious through the tear in beauty, raw ligaments taut when he speaks: “You have done enough.” He speaks to you in Westron, sweeping you out of this story.

He strides through the blood on the floor, careless of the way it steeps his light robes an obscene crimson. He does not suffer the indignity of stepping around the destruction: it is everywhere.

The deep halls brim with a new knowing. It is carnal; it is fresh and briny. Your insides twist.

He bestows his icy gaze on you, awe-inspiring and maimed. He declares, “There is nothing in my kingdom that I would give to you. This begs the question," and he pauses long enough that you ask it of yourself, bludgeon yourself with it, could scream it at yourself, "why are you here?”

You take another stumbling step forward, another, wanting to be more than a voyeur to tragedy.

Thranduil tilts his head in a way so familiar, dissecting you with one arresting blue eye and one eye that glows an unholy white -– unseeing and omniscient at once.

He knows what you want. He knows everything of you.

“I only want," you insist in Sindarin, "to help.” You stare, nearly reverent. Thranduil should be dead. Or dying, like his woodlands. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he is hollowing out before your eyes, sunken with slaughter.

You reach up a hand, wanting to steady him where he stands -- though he stands as exalted in his power as he is in his agony. It is not a question of whether you want to touch Thranduil.

You cannot.

It is Thranduil who touches instead, cold fingers lowering your reaching hand with only a grazing stroke against your knuckles. His touch burns through you. He smells like lily of the valley underneath the miasma of bloodshed.

“And yet," Thranduil intones softly, "you have wrought only disharmony.”

You go still under a gaze that commands you submit.

“Meandering the land hungry for racket and bruises, as though with strife you may cobble together some meager pride,” he observes, “Ranger.”

And that is _all_ you are. You are not Beren, nor some Gondorian ruler. You are Aragorn, come bearing only mortality and scraps of a home distant from you -– a wanderer sheltered by tolerant Imladris Elves.

Faceless and pseudonymous, you have dared enter Mirkwood with doom dressing your shoulders. A mud-spattered Ranger.

But you do not drop your gaze.

Thranduil smiles as he marks this, and takes his time gutting you. He leans in close. “I do not look so fondly on stray dogs as my son does.”

He retracts his hand. He wipes it on his robes.

You shiver.

“Legolas.” He turns his attention away and finally reverts to Sindarin -- gentle, abruptly. “See to it that this Ranger returns to wherever will abide his presence.”

Legolas appears by your side and Thranduil presses a kiss to his cheek. His teeth shimmer white through his wound in a macabre half-grin as Legolas responds with an abashed smile. The Elvenking grasps Legolas’ arm, a solitary admission of who makes the ache worth bearing.

Legolas escorts you away from unvarnished pain. He looks tranquil, like nothing is wrong, couldn’t possibly be. And yet pain persists still when you exit the king’s presence, as though Thranduil has left a barb somewhere visceral in you.

You turn your face away in bitterness toward soft light, wondering whether the pain goes to sleep if you hold on long enough, or if the only way out is to let go.

You draw in the scent of lavender and petrichor. Legolas cleaves the darkness with a smile. He confesses he is pleased to see you.

So you keep holding on.

+

Aragorn squints his eyes open and finds Legolas materializing from some vines to kneel back down beside him on the undulating forest floor.

“Finished exploring already?” he grunts with some effort.

“Oh, never, by my estimation,” Legolas answers breezily, touching at Aragorn’s temple with his knuckles.

Gimli waves Legolas over to his spot at the fire, and they decide Legolas will take second watch; the Elf wants to witness the deep night mists roll in and drift upon the leaves of Fangorn before dawn.

“And the Man’s responsibility is to take his rest,” decides Gimli pointedly.

Aragorn pushes himself up onto an elbow, queasily resolute. “No, Gimli –- “

“We will not negotiate with you this night, son of Arathorn,” Legolas interjects with some pride.

He has adorned his fishtail braid with the featherfoil blossoms. A shame to see beauty deserving of admiration buried deep in the wild, with only a disheveled Man and Dwarf to behold.

Arwen, his erstwhile betrothed perhaps already a world away by now at Grey Havens, has ever been a beauty perfectly centered within her scenery. The bridge, and Arwen there; the swell of Cerin Amroth, and Arwen there. Ever in frame, as if she had stepped out of painted legend; she commands attention.

Arwen and her home, Imladris, where courtliness parades dreamily in her periphery. Where Elves tolerate Aragorn’s presence.

But perhaps in that dichotomy lies the beauty of Legolas; he eschews the lofty, clear heights of Imladris for an allure as sinuous as the labyrinthine Woodland, fervent in its communion with earth. Primal and serene at once.

Perhaps that is also how Legolas loves.

But that is too much thinking, Aragorn decides headily. He presses himself back against the forest floor, feeling strangely bared. He reaches out beside him to clutch his scabbard and draw it near, reminding himself of all he is meant to be.

Legolas kneels again next to Aragorn, offering him a drink from his flask. “You need not wait on me like this,” Aragorn assures with a touch at the Elf’s cloth shoe. Real, he reminds himself. “Fangorn awaits you.”

Legolas bows his head lightly, but then observes, “Your ailment worsens.”

“No -- naught but fever dreams,” Aragorn reassures him; they are, after all. Vivid, strange, but no real indictment against him. No need to be contrite. No need to examine.

Though he does. And he will. And it is absurd, but there is no part of this evening that is not.

He shudders. A puff of breath that escapes his chest emerges cloudy with the cold and dissipates in the inky dark. The meager embers of their fire are no match for the season.

“Would that I had your healer’s hands,” Legolas wishes, so low it is barely distinct in this choked wood.

“You do,” murmurs Aragorn.

Legolas hums a couple notes of something forlorn and sweet, before the primordial silence reclaims its hold on the forest and they too are taken away with it.

+

Say you decided to kiss Legolas once Thranduil’s eyes cannot chill you anymore.

You do it, because he is right where you want him and it will always be the wrong time. He is here with you as you have longed him to be, and there will never be a way made for the two of you. There is just this moment, marginalia to be scratched out and written over -- and that is all.

You do it, finally. It is clumsy for how sudden it is. You have longed to for so long. Just one kiss before leaving. Just once.

Legolas ducks away from you, turns on his heel to hide his smile. He touches his lips, keeps smiling behind his hand. He is so beautiful.

It feels new, falling like this, utterly alight with flame and unable to resist irrationality. The carnage of a people’s slow, inevitable collapse blinks out of sight, the tragedies sail far away, and nothing can assail you. You forget Menegroth despoiled and Doriath degraded and that anything could ever go wrong again. You only marvel at how it could be that such radiance could hide away for so long within these grim walls.

You catch Legolas around his waist in the middle of the long hallway and pull him in close, and he looks stunned and begins to smile that moonlit smile again, and then: “I will be caught.”

“Then let him see,” you say with a thrill of defiance, but Legolas plucks your hands off of him.

“Dúnedain wandering the Elvenking’s halls make for ill portent,” Legolas declaims. “It is for the best you leave this place ere you draw his ire.” A hand against your arm, he leads you out into Mirkwood’s unforgiving forest.

You make it some paces through the foliage before the nearest rowan tree gives Legolas pause.

He turns to you and curls a finger around the hilt of your sword, coaxing you to follow him as he backs himself against the rowan’s smooth bole.

He leans himself against the tree. You move close, entranced as though sleepwalking, and he meets you there -- he kisses you slowly and deeply. You put your hands on Legolas, his neck and his slender waist. You kiss him, slowly and deeply. Then fiercely, heated -- you have wanted, longed, needed.

Legolas strokes his fingers up and down the length of the tree behind his back idly, presses his palms to its flawless skin. He makes himself vulnerable, inviting you to kiss him again, again, again, touch him where you want, make yourself unsteady with desire.

You press your face into the crook of his neck and shoulder, breathing in lavender and petrichor. You drag your hand up his thigh and urge his legs apart, feel the way he shifts under your touch. Your body hums in anticipation. “I want you,” you say. Your voice catches. It feels so good to say it aloud. “I want you,” you repeat like a paean against his throat.

Legolas asks you with restraint, “What do you want with me?”

You map his exquisite face. He coyly brushes his thigh up between your legs, a small beckoning motion against your arousal that sends pleasure flying through you.

“I want to make love to you,” you murmur. You kiss him fiercely now. He keeps you frotting against his thigh; you know how he could undo you like this, but you want -–

Legolas moves as if to seek another refuge, but you hedge him in against the tree. “Right here,” you say, the fool. “Right now.”

And the Elf immediately undoes your belt, the ties on your trousers. “I have longed for you like this,” you whisper in his ear, aching for completion with him. “You know that?”

He takes your cock in his hands, a light touch that translates torturous. “I want to be good to you,” you mouth against his ear. “I want to give you what you give me.”

Legolas tilts his head back against the tree, his eyes as icy as the Elvenking’s even as a smile graces his lips.

You distantly register that Legolas does not believe you.

Your insides twist; you don’t want to think, only press in heavily and tear open that maddeningly high collar, seeking more skin, more of him to know. "I want to be right for you," you promise.

You pull his princely raiment half off his shoulders, loving him disarrayed with lips swollen like this. You don't want to think of anything else. You don’t want to think when you have at last found your way to the place you’ve craved. “I want to be what you want,” you say.

“You want to doom me,” Legolas answers, so tenderly you almost do not comprehend his accusation.

“ -– No,” you manage, while he keeps stroking so, so good -– “I want to see you safe.”

“From your own poison?”

You shake your head, bewildered by how terribly you ache for him, your guilt for it.

“You want to be my downfall,” he purrs. “You want to defile me.”

“No,” you protest, but it rattles hollowly. He is as powerful as a gale and you are powerless.

“You want to shackle me,” he murmurs upon your lips while he presses his svelte body against you, hitting you with a gratification that makes you rut into his hand like an animal. "And pull me down with you.”

Deftly the Elf slips from your grasp. He falls to his knees and looks up at you with his face flushed and sweet, eyes exacting as a knife.

“I will never be yours,” he says to you, and takes your cock between his lips.

You buck into that heat before you can pace yourself, listening to him choke as he accepts you deeply in his mouth, and it’s everything in you to keep yourself from coming right then.

Legolas’ hands find yours and guide them to the back of his head. He bids you to tangle your fingers into his immaculate hair and hold him still while you fuck his mouth.

You see his eyelashes flutter while you thrust, feel his nails dig into your thighs while he braces himself; he is so beautiful.

He is not yours. Never yours. Never yours.

He drags his tongue up the length of your cock, gazing up at you. Takes you deep again.

You come, a shiver and a sharp exhale. You say his name.

You wake up.

+

No, no. This is not the time. Not in these wilds and in this disorienting quiet that lays bare every indignity. Aragorn throws off Legolas’ cloak and then his own, dragging a palm against his sweat-soaked forehead. Denigrated, he staggers to his feet and blinks owlishly at his alien surroundings.

Gimli snores fitfully nearby. Second watch has begun. Legolas is somewhere high above him in one of these towering trees, perhaps high enough to meet the starlight. Perhaps high enough that, in his endeavors to learn from the wise, cautious trees and gain their trust, he had not caught what Aragorn might have said or done in sleep. Perhaps.

Absurd.

His fever has broken. The dew lacing the tapestry of leaves tells of dawn’s advent. Unsettled, he reaches for his flask. He will clean up and forget this.

He reminds himself of who he is and who he is meant to be; he takes a slow breath, and recovers alone.


End file.
